Microsoft forays into the Metaverse with Teams update and Xbox update

American tech giant Microsoft is making forays into the metaverse with updates to its Teams and Xbox console services, as well as a new product called "Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces."

On November 2, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the company's metaverse plans for Teams and Spaces at the Microsoft Ignite conference.

“The Metaverse allows us to embed computing in the real world, and the real world in computing,” Nadella said. “Bringing a sense of real presence to any digital realm. Most importantly, we are able to bring our humanity, the choice The way we want to experience the world."

The Metaverse is here, and it's changing not just the way we see the world, but the way we engage with it—from the factory floor to the boardroom.

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 2, 2021

The update to Microsoft Teams, dubbed "Mesh," will debut in 2022 and offer users personalized digital avatars and immersive spaces to meet in the metaverse, "accessible from any device, no special equipment required" .

Later in the development of Mesh, organizations will also be able to build custom spaces to support environments such as meetings or "social gatherings."

Mesh Update: Microsoft

First previewed in December 2021, Microsoft's new offering, Dynamics 365 Connected Spaces, will enable organizations to integrate metaverse and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies with their businesses. In what it calls a "hybrid work environment," Spaces can be used to leverage data from cameras "from retail stores to factory floors," the company said.

Vishal Sood, general manager of Connected Spaces, wrote in a blog post on November 2: "Using the power of existing cameras, using computer vision and observational data to help complete the image - providing a new perspective on people, places and things. perspective."

“Once deployed, simply turn on the AI-driven models, called skills, that can help understand specific scenarios, such as customer behavior during promotional displays, business models, and unique insights into your space.”

In a Nov. 3 interview with Bloomberg Television, Nadella also said that Microsoft's video game company Xbox is "absolutely" committed to integrating the Metaverse into its line of games. However, the CEO was tight-lipped and didn't provide any specific updates on the gaming space.

"You can definitely expect us to do something in the gaming space," Nadella said, adding:

"If you think of Halo as a game, it's a metaverse. Minecraft is a metaverse, and so is Flight Sim. In a sense, they're 2D now, and the problem is Can you now take that to a fully 3D world, we absolutely plan to do that."

Microsoft isn’t the only mainstream giant launching plans for the Metaverse this week, with Cointelegraph reporting earlier today that Nike has filed a trademark application for its iconic logo and slogan for an “online virtual world.” The company also recently posted two job postings for virtual material designers.

Nike said the new hires will "play a key role in redefining our digital world and ushering us into the metaverse."

As we all know, social media giant Facebook is entering the metaverse, renamed Meta, the company is committed to providing creators with a platform to conduct virtual online businesses, connecting online experiences with the real world, and launching a project called "Reality Labs". Virtual reality hardware business.

In an interview with CNBC's Squawk Box on Oct. 29, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian commented on Facebook's plans, calling them a "nice move to divert and distract" from the issues plaguing the company.

While Ohanian pointed out that Meta should not be “undervalued,” he emphasized that there is enough organic movement in the crypto space to create an open Metaverse, not controlled by social media giants:

"There's a bottom-up movement right now to create the Metaverse. We've seen what's happening in the crypto community...we've seen a lot of people building what I think and hope will be a more organic world than A world imposed by Facebook from the top down."

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